Police in Ferguson, Mo., this month (top) and a National Guardsman during the 1967 Detroit riot. / Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images; Tony Spina/Det

By Shirley Stancato

Detroit Free Press guest writer

Shirley Stancato

A number of people viewing recent events in Ferguson, Mo., have asked me, “Could it happen here?”

My answer: It did.

Detroiters of a certain age have experienced an overwhelming sense of déjà vu watching the reports from Ferguson.

With a growing African-American population that makes up two-thirds of the town and a police department that is mostly white, Ferguson bears a striking resemblance to Detroit in 1967.

The immediate event that touched off the public outburst in Ferguson was the shooting of an unarmed black teen by a white police officer. But that one incident would not have produced such a powerful reaction if the underlying conditions — a disenfranchised community with real grievances that feels its voice is not being heard — did not exist.

Unfortunately, as one young Ferguson resident said, “They didn’t pay attention to us until we did this.”

Here in Detroit, four days after our outbreak began, then-Gov. George Romney called then-Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and said, “None of us saw this coming. We need to do something about that.”

The two of them then reached out to a young Joseph Hudson, CEO of Detroit’s largest department store and a leader in the corporate community, to pull together a new coalition unlike any that had ever been convened in Detroit, or anywhere else in America. The result was the formation of New Detroit — made up of leaders from the business, education, labor, grassroots and faith communities — to open new lines of communications among groups that were not communicating with one another.

As the late Arthur Johnson, one of the founding members, said, “New Detroit meetings were the first time that most of the black and white leadership had gotten together, face-to-face.”

Those lines of communication are crucial to our well-being as a community and as a society. We have to communicate with, and develop relationships with, people of different races and backgrounds if we are to build a true community.

While we have come a long way in a number of areas since 1967, many of the inequities that existed in our nation, state, region and city still persist today.

A New York Times report explained that the “unemployment gap is virtually unchanged over the last 40 years. The income and wealth gaps have actually widened. So has the gap in educational attainment.”

New Detroit issued a report with similar findings earlier this year, documenting significant gaps between racial and ethnic groups throughout the tri-county area in basic categories such as educational achievement, income, home ownership and business ownership.

Race relations, even in the best of circumstances, are hard work, particularly in a country where the racial divide, as the Times noted, “is older than the republic itself, a central fault line that has shaped the nation’s history.”

Clearly, while we have made significant progress in race relations in Detroit over the past 47 years, we still have far to go.

A lot of positive and exciting things are happening in Detroit these days. We’re seeing new investment, new housing, new businesses and new residents, particularly in downtown and Midtown.

But in the long run, none of that will have a lasting impact if we don’t make sure that all parts of the community participate in these exciting new developments. If we don’t make sure that every segment of the community is at the table and involved, we are building a house of cards.

In Ferguson, the myth that America has entered into some sort of idyllic post-racial society has once again been shown to be just that — a myth.

Here in Detroit, it serves as a reminder that we can never take whatever progress we make for granted, particularly in the area of race relations. We can’t take our eyes off the situation just because things have gotten better for the moment.

It should not take a Ferguson to remind us that we are still a long way from creating a society where equal opportunity is a reality for everyone. We all must, as a community, keep our eyes on that reality and work to eliminate those gaps every day of the year. And we all, as individuals, have to examine our own role and responsibility in closing those gaps.

We have to realize, as Bob Fezzey, a Michigan Bell executive who was on loan to the original staff of New Detroit, wrote he had come to realize in 1967: “It’s everybody’s problem.”